Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Whadda Ya Mean "We," White Man?

Some place in the prints this morning, I saw President Obama characterized as bi-racial. It led me to thinking about the way we read men and women with different proportions of blackness in them. Pretty much up to now, it was the Nuremberg Law model: a little bit of Jewish blood, you're Jewish … a little bit of black blood, you're black.

Really, Marty? The way "we" think about persons with some black/African ancestry is "the Numerberg Law model?" I can't imagine most people today base their thinking on a Nazi racial purity law. And if "we're" thinking about black ancestry, wouldn't we be thinking about the one-drop statutes in the United States, which actually applied to African-Americans? And have the Jews in Marty's "we" abandoned their own definitions of Jewishness for the Nazi model?

Marty's thinking about multi-racial ancestry is just a lead in for a bash-session aimed Attorney General Eric Holder, the Reverend Al Sharpton, Rep. Elijah Cummings, Michael Eric Dyson (who Marty criticizes for either the amount or content of his writings) and other black gentleman who should have no concern about passing the "one-drop test." But then again, no one ever said Marty had to be coherent.

Robert Gibbs Goes Dane Cook: Steals Jokes from Sarah Palin to Make Fun of Her Focused like a laser.

BY Mary Katharine Ham

In a White House briefing where the president showed up (because Howard Kurtz wrote a column) to talk about his bipartisan health-care summit and getting beyond politics to solve problems, the White House press secretary used the dumbest political story of the week to take a shot at a former governor and Fox News Contributor from the podium.

...

Gibbs went petty today, as he so often does, by scribbling notes on his palm today, featuring "eggs, milk, bread, hope and change."

This would have been funny if Sarah Palin hadn't already made the joke, and better, herself.

Palin wrote "Hi, Mom" on her hand before a Sunday rally for Rick Perry in the wake of the uproar over her hand notes the day before. It was one of those moments that, for any person not caught up in Palin Derangement Syndrome, should have made crystal clear why people love her. For all his strengths, Barack Obama is capable of nothing like that sort of folksy self-deprecation.

Gibbs' joke kind of loses its punch when its subject has already made it. Plus, now the Left is forced to write about how totally lame Palin's joke was while simultaneously praising Gibbs' truly lame copy of it. That's gonna be some tough blog-writing, but I believe in them.

All this to say...Robert Gibbs is the Dane Cook of political humor. I hope he's proud of himself.

At the risk of being compared to Milton Berle, let me say that Mary Katherine Ham is fucking retarded.

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Our Assistant Managing editor Michael van der Galien did a great job live-blogging today's episode of Glenn Beck. You can read them all here: Glenn Beck Live Blog Part I Glenn Beck Live Blog Part II Glenn Beck Live Blog Part III Glenn Beck Live Blog Part IV Glenn Beck Live Blog Part V Glenn Beck Live Blog Part VI Glenn Beck Live Blog Part VII NewsReal Blog will frequently live-blog Glenn Beck as well as other cable news programs and presidential speeches. We hope you'll join us for the next one.